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Who are the best characters on TV, past or present? A couple of years back, I wrote a post giving a personal top 50. That post has received more comments and readership than any other I’ve written. I still get complaints about omissions, sometimes with great suggestions, sometimes with awful ones. So I thought I’d give it another crack.

But this time I wanted to break them down into four categories, parsing out leads and supporting characters. Also, since my previous list waxed more decidedly male, I’m dividing these into genders too. I admit to struggling a lot more to eliminate men than women when making the lists. Maybe that’s because television writers on the whole haven’t done as good a job of creating female characters, maybe it’s because I’m personally more drawn to the tales of masculinity, or a bit of both.

Anyways, here’s the first of four. A caveat — I don’t intend this to be a master list, like the AFI Top 100 Films or something like that. It’s the characters that I like at this moment in time. Some aren’t here because I don’t watch that show, or never watched enough of it to allow them consideration. (And since I grew up outside the US, I don’t know a bunch of older shows). Some aren’t because, hey, it’s my list and I do what I want. I also had to draw some odd lines regarding who is a lead and who isn’t, though I usually defaulted to who the advertising treats as the lead. But please, tell me who you’d put on your own lists, and tell me when I’m wrong.